Road House: Business In The Front, Party In The Back

[THE CHALK-OUTLINE]

Road House (1989): Breakdown by Rantbo

WALKING TALL, but with a bunch more knife fights, dick punches and gratuitous female nudity. And instead of the good guys trying to put the bad guy’s bar out of business, it’s the other way around.

[THE EXECUTION]

From the moment the title is revealed, you know you are in for 114 minutes of pure class and sophisticated fun as the words Road and House are proudly displayed next to the perfect posterior of a hard-body club-slut as she steps out of Don Johnson’s car. I’m assuming that he stayed in the vehicle to finish doing bumps off the dash-board, as he isn’t in this picture.

ROAD HOUSE is like a modern day (and by that I mean 80s modern) western and it follows a lone hero that combines Eastern Philosophy and Martial Arts with a Western Setting and Hairstyle. It might not strike a cord with critics the way that MAGNIFICENT SEVEN or FISTFUL OF DOLLARS did, but I still think that it has a more dedicated and vocal fan base then most other combination East and West Action films. And in the end, that’s what really matters.

On top of Dalton being one of the greatest 80s action heroes (more on him the next section), Swayze’s nemesis in this flick, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) is arguably one of the greatest unintentionally funny, yet still awesome bad-guys of the 1980’s. And I’m talkin’ THE KARATE KID, PART III’s Terry Silver kind-of awfully-awesome

Wesley throws lavish sexy-parties, drives with complete disregard for other people’s safety, extorts the poor townsfolk, beats his sex slave and employs no less than 7 monster-truck driving, hillbilly thugs, which even HE kicks the shit out of. In one of his best scenes, Wesley berates his goons for failing to kick Swayze’s ass and picks one seemingly at random to blame. His lackeys disgust him, because (and I’m paraphrasing here) they are “bleeders—messy bleeders” (which explains why he is not often seen around women) and to correct this he beats his men about the face, making them bleed their disgusting blood and performing his knee-to-groin technique of tough love. That’ll learn ’em.

This movie is filled with pure 1980’s sexually unabashed American Win. It’s practically a 90 minute barfight at a gay nightclub on nickle-beer night. It’s so filled with machismo and un-cut fun, I think if you were to add the number of boobs shown, to the number of mullets, and multiply that number by the amount of knife fights and dick-punches and read the sum out loud–you’d enter nirvana on a winged horse and sporting a permanent rock-solid foot-long boner, while Little Richard sings you home to Shangri La.

The Philosopher
– “My Way—Or The Highway.”
– “It’ll Get Worse Before It Gets Better.”
– “Nobody EVER Wins A Fight.”
– “The Ones Who Go Looking For Trouble Are Not Much Of A Problem To Someone Who’s Ready For Them.”
– “Give Me The Biggest Guy In The World, You Smash His Knee, He’ll Drop Like A Stone.”
– “Pain Don’t Hurt.” (My Favorite)

The Rules#1. Never Underestimate Your Opponent, Expect The Unexpected.#2. Take It Outside. Never Start Anything Inside The Bar Unless It’s Absolutely Necessary.#3. Be Nice—Until It’s Time To NOT Be Nice. And Only Dalton Knows When This Is.
(Thankfully, this ends up being once every 10 minutes)

The Known Weaknesses
– Doesn’t Fly—It’s Too Dangerous (I Assume That This Statement Was Half A Sentence, The Rest Of It Being “…For The Other Passengers”)
– Combat Knives
– Uber-Tan Bleached Blondes.
– And He Is Physically Unable To Wear A Shirt For Longer Than 5 Minutes Of Consecutive Screen-time.

The Legend
– He Once Ripped A Guys Throat Out In Memphis.
– Has Bawls Big Enough To Cum In A Dumptruck. (Read As: FILL UP a dumptruck)
– You Fuck With Him And He’ll Seal Your Fate.

[THE BODY COUNT: 5 FOR CERTAIN, 2 MOST LIKELY]

This movie is all about only-when-necessary beat-downs. But when Dalton’s lover, Sam Elliot, gets his chest penetrated by a knife, Dalton goes fuckin’ apeshit and starts killin’ bitches. He starts his mini-massacre by taking out the penultimate villain in one of the BEST fight sequences ever (discussed in the following section) and he goes on to take out 2 more for certain with a knife and another 2 are assumed dead, but you don’t see it happen. The final kill goes down as a team effort, which you can read about in the EPIC MOMENT section below.

[MOST SATISFYING DEATH]

Enter the Jimmy. The Darth Vader to Wesley’s Emperor—if Darth Vader were gay and knew kung-fu. Which as a side thought, would have been awesome. I digress. Jimmy is the pay-off bad guy, as Wesley’s demise has more than just Dalton’s inner peace at stake. So knowing this, the filmmakers give us a man that can fight Dalton and actually stand a chance. He even looks like Dalton‘s Evil Twin. Dalton has a straight blonde-colored mullet, Jimmy has a curly brunette one. Dalton has an allergy to wearing shirts, Jimmy wears his with only the bottom button closed. Dalton has Hottie-Doc, Jimmy has gay shark-tooth necklace—OK, I don’t really get that one either, but the point is, these two were born to do battle with one another.

~Do You Really Want To Hurt—Me?~

It all goes down at night, right after Jimmy blows up Dalton’s friend’s house and it becomes apparent that the time to NOT be nice is upon us. A laughing Jimmy is tackled by a shirtless (of course) Dalton off of his motor bike and onto a patch of sand down by the river. The fight that ensues is one of the most fantastic and homoerotic showdowns in Badass Cinema. The two punch and round-house one another for 3 minutes and Jimmy’s true nature for all his pent-up rage is unveiled as he drops his famous one-liner: “I used to fuck guys like you in prison!” Yikes. Dalton prevails though by using his cunning cat-like kung-fu, crunching Jimmy’s split legs against a tree and crushing his testicles like fortune cookies with an upper-cut dick-punch he learned from Sam Elliot. This clearly signifies Dalton as the winner—but not so fast! Jimmy The Queer is a coward and pulls a gun. Apparently guns have the same effect on Dalton that red capes have on bulls, ‘cuz Dalton’s nose flares as he kicks the gun out of Jimmy’s hand, rushes him and, using an eagle-claw hand maneuver—RIPS OUT HIS FUCKING THROAT, KICKS HIM INTO THE LAKE AND SCREAMS IN BLOODLUST: “WESLEY—WESLEY, FUCK YOU!!!”

[DUDESWEAT AND MACHISMO]

“OK, Dalton! I’ve always wanted to try you!”

“Your ass is mine, boy!”

“I used to fuck guys like you in prison!”

A Whore: “Why won’t you look me in the eye, Dalton?”
Dalton: “I’m shy.”
A Whore: “Would you be shocked if I said, “Let’s go to my place and fuck”? It ain’t gonna kill you. You know, you might even like it.”

Somehow, I don’t think so. Dalton does, at one point, have sex with Kelly Lynch. But, I think it was just because he mistook her for the lead singer of White Snake.

In Order To Tell These Two Apart, One Of Them Is Gonna Have To Wear A Sombrero…

Afterward, he sits outside in the moonlight, naked, contemplating his obvious mistake. As Dalton is so gay, he actually turns otherwise heterosexual men gay, just by looking at them stoically. And when he takes off his shirt, oils his chest and does tai chi?–forget about it. Dalton: Women want him–Men want him more.

Also, you get to see Swayze’s dick as he runs and jumps into the filthy river outside his house to fuck it out in front of his neighbor with White Snake. And I think, if you look closely, you can actually see the body of Jimmy still floating in the background.

[EXPLOITATION AND MISOGYNY]

“That gal’s got entirely too many brains to have an ass like that.”
But we know that Kelly Lynch is smart, because she wears a pair of comically large glasses and glasses add +1 intelligence.

Dalton’s braising machismo and rock-hard 6-pack end up enticing Hottie-Doc to eventually date him and follow him around the third act disapproving of everything he does that initially turned her on about him. You know, normal girlfriend shit. But she does show her titties after he bangs her against a cobble-stone fireplace, so there is that. And she isn’t alone. In fact, if there isn’t a fight in progress (and sometimes, even when there is), there are usually at least one pair of titties somewhere on screen and in focus for hetero male pleasure. It’s nice to know that the filmmakers also thought of the straight guys that might be interested in seeing the movie. All two of us.

Aside from all the playful female nudity, there is a dark side to the film as well. The main villain Wesley has his trophy sex-toy beaten purple for trying to pull the sword out of the stone that is Dalton’s unwavering homosexuality. Later, after hard learned lessons have healed up, Wesley has her dance (fuck air) on stage in front of the staff of the Double Deuce–I assume to gross them out.

[EPIC MOMENT AND BEST ONE-LINER]

Stalking through Wesley’s room of safari death, Dalton hides as Wesley enters the room and delivers THE gayest line in the movie: “I see you’ve found my trophy room, Dalton—the only thing that’s missing—is your ass.” And I didn’t think you could out-gay the prison fucking line, but kudos to the screenwriter. Wesley proceeds to insult Dalton’s memory of Sam Elliot and THEN tries and bribe him! The last pathetic act of a desperate man.

Finally, the fight breaks out and it is super unfair as Dalton has been beaten and shot. I mean COME ON, maybe if Dalton has lost a leg or two, Wesley could have stood a chance, but no way could he have actually hope to beat him. Dalton whips his ass and for some reason or another Hottie-Doc shows up just in time to watch Dalton finally repent his throat-ripping ways in giving the old man mercy. But this is the eighties so, of course, Wesley pulls a gun and in the craziest turn of events, is riddled with off-screen fired buckshot by all the key members of the pissed off townsfolk. I swear man, Wesley’s button-down shirt must have been made of Kevlar as it takes them four–got that FOUR!–rounds of shotgun blasts to bring the bastard down. A grizzly bear hopped up on pcp would have gone down quicker! But, it’s probably for the best that Wesley finally crapped out as he was bleeding everywhere. And as we well know, Wesley despises bleeders.

There are plenty of good lines in this one, and while I love “Pain don’t hurt.” I think I have to go with an often over looked gem of badassitude: